Emailing BI / Dashboard Reports from JIRA

[Andrew Frayling]

Hi All,

Has anyone had any success with creating email subscriptions to JIRA Dashboards and Reports so a user can create a comprehensive BI/Dashboard/Report with charts, graphs, lists of issues, etc. and have this report generated and emailed to a specified set of users at a specified interval (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)? Basically the same email settings as filter subscribtions, but for a comprehensive BI/dashboard-style report rather than just a list of issues.

I've had a look at a few threads on here:

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/71326/printing-or-exporting-a-jira-report

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/10983/jira-reports

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/40824/emails-from-filters

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/3983/send-an-email-from-jira-dashboard

and a couple of plugins:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.valiantys.jira.plugins.reporting

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.midori.jira.plugin.pdfview-metadata

but I haven't found anything that does exactly what I want in generating a graphical report that can be configured to be automatically emailed to users at a specified interval.

I've started looking at custom development for this, but my initial impression is that it's going to be non-trivial as it's going to involve:

1. Generating the reports

2. Converting them to PDF or similar so they can be embedded/attached to emails rather than users having to log in to JIRA

3. Managing the subscriptions

Would appreciate peoples' opinions on this. Has anyone done it? Woud you advise doing it? Am I over or under thinking the complexity of the customisation? Would you push JIRA data to a BI tool and generate the reports from that instead?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Andrew.

[Midori]

So, two and a half year later I have better answer!  

(I'm copying it from a similar question for your convenience.)

With recent JIRA PDF View Plugin version (3.5.0 or newer) you can export JIRA dashboard to PDF documents!

How does that solve your problem?

1. Create a JIRA dashboard with the report(s) you wanted to be automatically emailed. You can include any number and any type (pie, created vs. reported, two-dimensional counts, etc.) of these reports. You can freely customize the export template, choosing the best layout, showing or hiding the data tables and charts, etc. See this article.
2. Set up automatic emailing of the dashboard as explained in this tutorial. It can happen periodically (ex: every morning) or at various issue events (ex: when a new critical bug is created in project FOOBAR).

This is a sample export showing three reports with chart and data table (PDF version):

[Hitesh.Kumar]

@Midori - Can we achieve this without this 3rd party plugin? for JIRA cloud?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

There are no built-in features for this on Jira Cloud.

You can export dashboards to PDF with the Better PDF Exporter app (it supports all deployment types, including Jira Cloud). The automation part is currently unsolved AFAIK.

[Renjith Pillai]

Andreaw, a dirty hack is to use firefox to print to pdf (i remember finding a extension for firefox) from command line. Use a cron, and pass in the username password in the os_username, os_password commands.

[Andrew Frayling]

Thanks Renjith. Is this the extension - http://www.abeel.be/content/command-line-printing-firefox - ?

Will give this a whirl, but ideally I need something that's self-service that end users can configure themselves.

Any gut feel on if I'm right in thinking this would be a big job as a customization to JIRA? If you had a Business Intelligence (BI) tool that did all of this already would you spend your time getting JIRA data into the BI tool instead?

Cheers,

Andrew.

[Renjith Pillai]

Saw this post so late. Yes this is the plugin. Yeah, the dashboards are in a way the BI from JIRA. But if you are looking at extensive reports from JIRA, actually why not directly plug into JIRA database and generate all sorts of reports from a BI application. But ofcourse, need to get into database details.

[Andrew Frayling]

Hi Renjith,

The database/BI route is my preferred option, but just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious with extending JIRA's reporting functionality.

Thanks,

Andrew.

[Midori]

if querying the database directly is acceptable for you, then I must note that you can do that with JIRA PDF View Plugin, writing simple Groovy scripts for the data access.

why would you that?

1. you save the headache of composing PDF files

3. the action link is displayed automatically in the standard JIRA web user interface, so it is very intuitive for users

[Midori]

here are some advices, Andrew, if you decided to approach the problem using the JIRA PDF View Plugin. parts of this are applicable in other situations, too.

1. theoretically you can build whatever report you need, utilizing the Groovy scripting features of the plugin. depending the complexity of your reports, this can be trivial or harder, but anything is possible. i suggest using the Google Guava library for data processing and JFreeChart for rendering chart visualizations into your PDF (if needed).

2. how to automate the PDF generation? you could develop a simple external Java program that simulates clicking the "PDF" link in the View menu, using some browser automation technology. i primariliy recommend Selenium. we use it with great success (in other projects).

3. how to automate email sending? simple: having the PDF saved, you could compose the body text of the mail, attach the file and send the mail using the Java Mail API.

hth.

[Midori]

as for point 2 and 3 in my previous post, using Ant could be a great time saver.

[Andrew Frayling]

Thanks Ferenc. Will pursue some of the ideas you'e suggested.

Cheers,

Andrew.

[xterase2001]

Is the possible without using PDF format? I want the images and hyperlinks to show up on my outlook emails and not as an attachment.  The only way I know is using a pic file format of the dashboard with only one hyperlink, but I would like to have all the links in the file to be selectable.  Anyone know how this can be done?  Thanks?